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Appian Corporation

Appian Corporation – Developer Of Cloud Computing As Well As Enterprise Software.

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After the internet, cloud computing is one of the best technology that is most beneficial for every business. The very technology has reduced the hectic work of managing the storage for the businesses and just buying some subscriptions, the data is readily available for every user of the data through the cloud. Hence, the technology is now adopted by almost every company in the world that deals with data and the internet. To process the data on the cloud, some software is required. This software helps the companies manage, deploy and access the data on the cloud. Appian Corporation is one of the leading software development companies known for its enterprise cloud software development. Appian creates software that helps other organisations to build applications for mobiles, desktops, and even the cloud on their own. The company has been in the business for over twenty years and has become a prominent name in the cloud software industry.

About Appian Corporation

Appian Corporation is the developer of cloud computing as well as enterprise software. The company was founded in 1999, and the team of founders included Michael Beckley, Matt Calkins, Robert Kramer, and Marc Wilson. The company headquarters is based in McLean, Virginia, United States, and apart from that, the Appian Corporation has its offices in fifteen different locations globally. The company is home to over 1500 employees, and according to the 2021 FY report, it made annual revenues worth $369.3 Million. The company is known for its low-code automation platform and has developed multiple apps for its customers.

Appian Corporation
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Founding Appian Corporation

Michael Beckley, Robert Kramer, Marc Wilson, and Matthew Calkin founded Appian in 1999. The idea behind the company was to gather talented people and use their knowledge and skills to get amazing results. This way, Appian was established to offer its employees the liberty to make their decisions to fulfill the company goals most innovatively. It was Calkin’s idea to build such a company, and other co-founders joined in later to found the company. 

The company introduced its first product, a web-based enterprise information service for the US army, named Army Knowledge Online, in 2001. The very service was also regarded as “the world’s largest intranet” at that time. 

The downturn of the economy during 2008 affected Appian too, but the leaders working for the success of the company had made a plan B for the company too. This time, Appian brainstormed over the concept of building software that would reduce most of the work for the organizations. So the company built a platform based on the “low-code technique”, which would allow the organizations to create their software on their own, without being a tech geek. The platform was a hit, as it was secure and could be used on any device, mobile, desktop as well as on the cloud.

The success of Appian’s new software platform brought it more success and investments. In 2014, New Enterprise Associates invested a sum of $37.5 million in Appian. In May 2017, the company went public on NASDAQ and started to trade with the ticker name APPN. With the release of Appian AI, the company introduced the integration of Artificial Intelligence to its platform in 2019. In the following years, Appian also made some acquisitions, including Novayre Solutions SL and Lana Labs.

Today, Appian offers its software services to industries like Automotive, Education, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Insurance, Life Sciences, Retail, Telecom, Transportation, etc. In fact, with the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, Appian launched apps that helped businesses with their work, like tracking the workforce’s health and safety, helping companies reopen their offices, and helping banks manage Paycheck Protection Programloan applications, etc. This way, those apps helped businesses to continue their work during the pandemic.

The CEO at Appian Corporation

Matt Calkins is one of the founders and the CEO of Appian. He is an Economics graduate from Dartmouth College. In fact, he was the topper of his class. In 1994, he joined MicroStrategy as the Director of Enterprise Product Group and left the company in 1999 to found Appian. Matt has been the CEO of Appian from the very beginning and has led the company to be the leading enterprise software developer. He is also known as the author of several award-winning board games.

epicor

Epicor – The Makers Of Business Software For Its Peers With Over Fifty Years Of Experience.

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The retail and business industry is the one that needs most of the documentation, and the software industry has played a vital role to help out those businesses with these hectic documentation processes. Software today is for almost every work, like tracking the resources, and keeping the records of inventory as well as exports, thus making the work seem less and quicker than earlier. Epicor is one of such software developers who are behind those amazing business software that is reducing the work time for every business globally. The company, with its over fifty years of experience in the software industry, has made its different identity from its peers.

About Epicor

Epicor Software Corporation is an American software company. The company was founded fifty years ago in 1972 in Texas, Austin, and since then headquarters of the company has been in the same city. Epicor is known for its business software which mainly includes, ERP, CRM, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Human Capital Management (HCM), and Retail software. This software is responsible for documenting everything from manufacturing, distribution, retail, services, etc., and all the products are available in both on-premises deployment and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models. Epicor is a private company, and Steve Murphy is the current CEO at Epicor. The company is home to over 5000 employees globally.

The company is about fifty years old and is excelling in the field of software development. Today, the company has expanded to over 150 countries, with over 4000 employees working for it and 120,000 clients worldwide.

epicor
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The Founding of Epicor

Epicor includes the story of two companies forming Epicor Software Corporation. In 1972 Triad Systems Corporation was established that became Activant in 2003, a contributing company to Epicor. On the other hand, Advanced Business Microsystems was a company that built accounting software for Ms-Dos in partnership with IBM. Later, ABM started to develop financial accounting software under the name Platinum and had its name changed from ABM to Platinum Software Corporation in 1992. With the new name, the company started to produce products for Microsoft Windows as well. After impacting acquisitions like Clientele and FocusSoft, the company merged its operations with DataWorks, and in 1999, was renamed Epicor Software Corporation. Activant, on the other hand, was acquired by Apax Partners, which ultimately merged the operations of Activant with Epicor Software Corporation.

Through Epicor’s Platinum for Windows software was very popular, the company sold it to Sage Group in 2001. Epicor introduced its web-based platform named Service Enterprises in 2003. Along with growing its products and their growth was contributed by some major acquisitions at the same time. The company acquired Intrepid (1995), Interactive Group (1997), CompuNet (2003), Scala (2004), CRS Retail (2005), NSB (2007), Spectrum Human Resource Systems Corporation (2010), Solarsoft Business Systems (2012), QuantiSense (2014), ShopVisible, LLC (2015), KKR (2016), 1 EDI Source (2019), etc.

The company also endorses the idea of sustainability and has released a program with the name ‘Fit for the Future.’

The CEO At Epicor

Steve Murphy is the current CEO of Epicor. He has over 25 years of experience in the field of technology. Murphy had joined the company in 2017. Before joining Epicor, he has worked in companies like OpenText, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Accenture, and Manugistics, in various executive roles. Academically, he has got a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California and has completed an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Slack

Salesforce to acquire work-chat service app Slack for $27.7 billion

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On Tuesday both Salesforce and Slack confirmed the acquisition of the latter for $27.7 billion by the software company Salesforce. This acquisition will mark one of the biggest business deals in the software industry and also the biggest in the history of Salesforce to date. Salesforce is a cloud computing giant which after owning the new work-chat app will amplify the working connectivity globally. The company will have a better shot at giving tough competition to the tech giant Microsoft.

Salesforce was one of the earlier companies in the IT industry to sell software in the form of subscription service. This saved many small companies and individual workers the time to install the programs on PCs. But, the concept of the software subscription is not a unique idea anymore. Many companies especially the big tech giants are making such online services with lucrative packages to offer, for example, IBM and Microsoft. So, what’s Salesforce’s plan in the long run?

Slack Competing with Microsoft

Slack is an application used for messaging on a professional level. It is mostly used to enable communication among a group of people (especially workplace teams) which offers more than just one-to-one chatting service. Unfortunately with Microsoft Teams into Office 365, the demand for Slack was pulled down. In July, Slack launched a complaint against Microsoft in the European Union for illegally offering Teams in Office 365 subscription. And, customers will rather prefer a subscription where they are offered more than one service and everything is connected to ease the workflow. On top of this, some of the main products of Salesforce are in tough competition with Microsoft’s to stay afloat in the market. So, what is better than making a deal to make the company bigger and better?

Slack
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The experts can see clearly that for Salesforce the main target is to outrun Microsoft as the latter is moving far ahead of Salesforce in terms of cloud computing. Marc Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce said that “Slack is a central nervous system for so many companies” and that “it’s a match made in heaven”. But, if it is only about outrunning Microsoft not every decision of the company might be fruitful.

The Salesforce – Slack deal

Salesforce is paying Slack $27.7 billion to close the deal. Under the agreements for this acquisition, the Slack shareholders will get $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each share of Slack. And, this calculation gives an entire value of $27.7 billion according to the November 2020 closing price of Salesforce’s common stock. March believes that this acquisition and what it will lead to will become the future of enterprise software. And, as the entire world is now getting accustomed to the work-from-home habit, the two companies might have hit the jackpot after all.

Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, believes that with every passing day enterprise software is becoming the core of any organization. So, to build products and services with less complexity, more flexibility, proper alignment, and organizational agility is the main goal. He also said that he believes this is the most strategic decision in the history of software.

The current reputation of Salesforce 

It has been over two decades that Salesforce is providing computing solutions to customers around the globe. The company has achieved massive success and recently it is also expanding its business by several acquisitions. The company bought a data analytics specialist for $15.7 last year. The current market value of Salesforce is approximately $220 billion which is around seven-folds greater than it was almost a decade ago. Kate Leggett, an analyst predicts Salesforce made a very positive acquisition as Slack will be added to its software suite giving people a similar experience like Office 365. If there are no hiccups in the way, Salesforce will take full control of Slack by mid-2021.

An arsenal of perks

Though Slack is a very handy alternative for email and other online communication, it is not as popular as it was expected to be. It is used by many companies and government agencies but not a hot deal for the investors. So, by selling it to one of the leading software companies in the world, Slack just made a perfect exit embarking on a new journey. With Slack being acquired now it will have a broad customer base of the Salesforce and attract new customers as well for the company.